Thoughts That Cure Radically: Robert De Niro, Sr. ‘Paintings and Drawings 1960-1993’ DC Moore Gallery

Robert De Niro, Sr., the father of the actor, occupies a unique position in postwar American painting. A figurative painter in an age of abstraction, a devotee of French Modernism when American art was touted as the new vanguard, an unabashed purveyor of liquid paint when clean edge was heralded, De Niro, Sr. often could not catch the critical or commercial break his work deserved. In an interview De Niro, Jr. gave with James Lipton on the Actor’s Studio Program, the actor talked briefly about his father’s art and how he had exhibited his paintings in his SoHo restaurants, indicating that the work was not well sought after. The New York gallery DC Moore attempts to rectify this situation by taking over sole representation of the artist’s estate. To celebrate, the gallery has displayed a generous sampling of paintings and drawings made from 1960 until the artist’s death in 1993.

A gifted colorist with a talent for painterly charcoal drawing, De Niro’s traditional subjects included nudes, still lives and landscapes. Compositionally, De Niro, Sr.’s paintings are soft and flabby, with wobbly brush marks substituting as shorthand for the depicted object. Entire areas of the canvas have cotton-candy sized marks that stand in for hills, glades and limbs. While De Niro, Sr.’s paintings show influences of Matisse, especially the color, they lack the steely discipline the Frenchman instilled on each and every surface he ever covered. Instead, De Niro, Sr.’s closest spiritual predecessor would be another Frenchman, Georges Roualt. Similar to Roualt, De Niro, Sr. leaves whole areas of the composition only marginally considered and instead telescopes onto the intended subject. While De Niro, Sr. does not have Roualt’s overt religiosity, he does exhibit a Roman Catholic type attitude towards painting, favoring the ornate, colorful and gilded over the dour Protestant confessionalism practiced by his Abstract Expressionist brethren.

De Niro, Sr., born in 1922 along with figurative painter Grace Hartigan, deserves to be re-considered for helping to reintroduce figuration back into mid-century painting. Similar to Hartigan, De Niro, Sr. pays homage to Romantic artists such as Delecroix and the music of Berlioz. Excused from the responsibility of the seriousness that abstraction demanded, De Niro, Sr.’s paintings can instead be viewed today for their painterly finesse and unabashed pictorial care.